There’s an editorial which at the end notes The journal will initially be run on private founding, later to be transformed to a permanent publishing house. Or, put another way, currently its a blog, but if they can fool anyone into taking it on, they will.

The editorial also announces the happy re-opening of the journal under a new management. New management? Well the new editorial board is here, and the old (via wayback machine) is here. The new board is definitely slimmed down. Its:

The ten ones marked with a “*” have had the good sense to drop out of the new journal. The NEW editors for the relaunched journal are Jelbring and Scafetta. Mmmmm, that really fills one with confidence that this isn’t a journal is “skeptics” for “skeptics”, no?

[Update: popcorn at wikipedia. The article [[Pattern Recognition in Physics]] has seen quite a bit of edit warring recently, with one “Intuitive2000” ending up blocked, in a rather traditional “I’m right, so the 3RR rule doesn’t apply to me” sort of way.

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Comments

The new PRP is not a blog this is a journal with editorial board. But you are using a blog

[I’m using a blog, certainly. But one doesn’t normally call a self-published set of words a “journal”, their calling it that looks like abuse of language. And the editorial board does not inspire confidence -W]

sorry for the double post, but the first “article” is out, and Nicola Scafetta out in force with his climatastrology, this time “applied” on a Sun flare.
Pure. Gold. Popcorn. Material. Even better than Answers in Genesis. You will have rainbow going out of your ears by reading this.

Nils-Axel Mörner’s editorial quotes the ‘concluding paper’ from PRP special issue one: “Obviously, we are on our way into a new grand solar minimum. This sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project.” The editorial then comments on this quotation: “What can be wrong in such a statement, which follows logically upon the identiﬁcation of solar cycles and repetition of grand solar minima and maxima?”

Presumably there may be other published estimates / relevant papers that complicate the picture? Or is a rebuttal of this aspect of the PRP editorial and of this conclusion in volume 1 issue 1 (quoted above) really that straightforward?

One wonders why they do not start a new journal. The idea of a scientific journal is to give the papers some advance credibility, to communicate to the reader that these articles are more worthwhile reading as posts on a blog. A new journal would at least have little credibility, but would not have to start with negative credibility.

After reading the editorial, I do not expect that they will find a new publisher for this journal. Such a publisher would need to be very desperate or ideologically biased to want to work with people that talk about their publisher in such a way.

Thanks for responding to my comment #4.
I know I shouldn’t be shocked, but I still find it breathtaking to see 19 authors prepared to sign up to such an easily falsifiable conclusion. I believe some of these people have science degrees and PhDs. The psychology of it is fascinating and tragic. Formatting a blog like a journal is clever, though. I suspect most people wouldn’t know the difference between this and a real journal, even if they understand that a journal carries more weight than a blog or a bloke down the pub.

Formatting a blog like a journal is clever, though. I suspect most people wouldn’t know the difference between this and a real journal, even if they understand that a journal carries more weight than a blog or a bloke down the pub.

And Pattern Recognition in Physics at least has an “editorial board”. Some other climate dissenters recently opened their own journal, called Open Peer Review Journal, where they are owner and editor and authors of the first 8 manuscripts. The manuscripts look great, just like a real scientific journal, the bloke down the pub would not notice the difference.

Thanks Victor #8, I’d forgotten about the Open Peer Review Journal. It reminds me of the NIPCC, they try to format their stuff in a sciencey-looking-type way too.

I was just about to predict confidently (admittedly without fitting a 9th-order polynomial to any planetary cycles) that PRP and the Open Peer Review Journal will feature heavily in the list of references for the next NIPCC “assessment”. But then I remembered that Tamino had pointed out that WUWT were heavily criticizing PRP for their flawed peer review process, among other things, so I suppose anything is possible.

@Rob: I’m not familiar with the paper you mentioned @4, but I have seen other papers that conclusively falsify the proposition that solar variability is the primary driver of climate variation in the last 100+ years. There was a time when that hypothesis was viable (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1991), but not anymore.

Over a standard 11-year solar cycle the solar irradiance varies by ~0.1%. That would produce about an 0.07 C response in the climate, if I make the spherical-cow assumption of a linear response to small variations in solar forcing. A Maunder-type minimum would be a bit larger than that, but not by enough to overcome CO2 forcing.